After that, they'd sometimes cross into a new state and find a whole town pooling resources to buy a few hours of healing, a pile of pain already waiting for them, but by ’34, the available sorrow and rage in America had begun to ebb, the market controlled by Lorna and Vix. That was when things went south.
Vix and Lorna started to leave on occasion with more than just pain, anger, and desperate love. Sometimes, they took happiness, too. Vix fell into the bed of a woman wanting to be rid of a childhood crime, and found himself departing with her college graduation day. Lorna made off with the coffee, cigarettes, and first love of a trumpet player who'd only wanted to forget the sadness of an instrument stolen on a train. They both staggered out of those bedrooms, wondering what they'd done, knowing that even though they'd had been given freely, memories like those were nothing that should've changed hands. They heard too many whispers, felt too many heartbeats. Pain and rage had dimmed the feelings of much of the country for years, and it was wearing off. Now the people who asked Vix and Lorna for healing sometimes didn't want anything more than a kiss from someone just like every other someone. People called for miracles, when all they really needed was a hand to hold.
There was a sheriff in Texas who developed a yearning for them both. His name was Sheriff Hank Yarley, and he was about to be retired. He was thin as an old razor and wore his medals shiny, and he formed himself a posse of gun-toting men, some of whom had had run-ins with the doings of Vix in particular. Deprived of wives, the men of the posse wandered around Texas like drained oilfields, all sputter and no spout. Their former wives looked pretty as prayer dust and lit grocery-store candles in their bedrooms, the face of sex-mad Saint Vix painted right there on each label for everyone to see.
Sheriff Hank Yarley's own wife had gone on the run, driving her mother's car clean across Louisiana to see if she could get her gaze on Vix Beller, and when she came back, she was no longer in love with the sheriff. Yarley wanted to repossess her love and fury (in her, they were one thing) and feed it back into her mouth by the spoonful, but it was with all the rest of the stolen emotions, in the trunk of one of Vix and Lorna's stolen cars. He aimed to get it back.
He pulled strings, and Vix Beller and Lorna Grant got declared Public Enemies, with a cash bounty of ten thousand dollars dead or alive. They'd been small-time celebrities before, but now they were fully famous. Every newspaper south of the Mississippi showed their portrait under the headline Cold-Blooded Healers. Their pretty faces decorated post office walls.
They were in the process of forming a gang back then, and they'd attracted a few boys and girls, but nobody could kiss like Vix, and nobody could caress like Lorna. When Yarley began his pursuit, they dropped their extras off somewhere near the shipyards in Port Arthur and kept right on going. The gang wannabees resented it, but what could they do? They were out of anger and out of woe. Vix and Lorna had taken it all.
Lorna and Vix were turned away from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Mexico, but the locals warned them in Louisiana, where the trade in emotions ran high. A shipment of cold rage they'd brokered from Colorado got loaded into a steamboat out of New Orleans and shipped through the Gulf. There was room reserved on the boat for Lorna and Vix, but with that bounty on their heads, they had to get out of town quick and missed their chance at disappearing into international waters. Half their load of blues went missing in Lubbock, and it got cut with who knew what. Both of them wondered, but they had no time to check it out, and so off it went, black-marketing itself into the mouths of people they'd never met.
They holed up in an old house in the Texas panhandle, but they were compromised by locals suspicious of their activities. Folks came walking down the road, drawn to them like rats to pipers, and after a few hours, the two of them bagged up the final remnants of North Texas's pain and anger and stowed it in the storm cellar.
When Sheriff Hank Yarley and his posse came down the drive, their line of cars bucking over the ruts in the dirt road, Vix and Lorna were heading out the back, driving across a field. By the time Hank Yarley took a fruitless run into a corn maze, his rifle flailing, his shoes full of dried-up kernels, their taillights were the only thing keeping him vertical. He shot a few times at the red lamps, swearing.
Back at the safe house, he found his posse scooping at a stash of sorrow with silver spoons from the kitchen. All of them looked up at him and pretended they were seeking their specific wifely sorrows, as opposed to getting high on the stolen sadness of strangers.
“That's evidence you're eating,” Sheriff Yarley said, ignoring the way the sorrow drifted on the air, trying not to inhale more than he could help. The two criminals had sucked the South dry and left blankness in their wake. Every town had addicts now and new problems created by lost love, it seemed to Yarley. Houston was full of people shooting rifles out their car windows and swearing that if only they had Vix and Lorna, they'd behave themselves. Up at the other end of the state, there were misery-mongers making profit on third-hand sadness sold from the duo's scrapings and then cut with sand and cigarette ashes.
Lorna and Vix didn't love the people they healed, and that was the part Yarley resented most of all. They loved only each other. Someone out in Hollywood was already making a movie about them, and in it, Sheriff Yarley had heard, there was a scripted moment in which he was personally mocked for being unable to lay down the law on the two unabiders.
One of the deputies looked up, his eyes glazed with tears.
“This here's some good, good shit, boss,” he said.
Beside him, another deputy savored a spoonful of shame, licking it up like sorghum.
“Be careful of that,” Yarley said. “I heard a boy out in San Antonio came upon some of this last batch of sad, and whatever they'd cut it with made his legs go limp. Lorna and Vix sent some shit to a dance hall in Lubbock. People out that way drag their feet now.”
Yarley made a phone call, and then another, looking at the map.
Out on the highway a few hours later, Vix and Lorna sped through the night, the backseat full of sacks of small misdemeanors, the secrets of teary-eyed preachers and of ladies in torn slips, the church-hatted whispers of the elderly. Lorna was wearing sunglasses in the dark, and Vix stroked her thigh, pushing her dress up past her garter.
“You know I love you, gal,” said Vix.
“Love you too, boy,” said Lorna.
“What are we going to do?” said Vix. “Looks like they've postered up the Midwest with our faces and places.”
“We could go to Mexico,” said Lorna. “Or Canada. We could hit Niagara Falls? Or get ourselves smuggled onto a ship and take it to South America? We could head out west, see if we could make it to California?”
Behind them, there were headlights. A mass of them, as many as there were stars. Looked like all of Texas had hit the highway, following Lorna and Vix as they tried to flee. There were intermittent gunshots.
“I'm about ready to hang it up, Vix,” said Lorna. “I've been working since I was sixteen. Sometimes I feel bad about the work I've been doing. It ain't all of it right.”
“You and me both, kid,” said Vix. “I'm getting tired of all this God. Maybe we're messing with the fate of the forlorn. Maybe nobody oughta pray to people like us.”
Lorna squeezed his fingers.
“I ever tell you about the time I brought a boy back from the dead?” she said.
“You know you didn't,” Vix said, and smiled at her. “You know everything you ever told me and everything I ever told you. I've got you memorized, but you still have some secrets.”
“Bet you do too. This was a few years before I met you. I came upon him right after he hung himself up. I cut that boy down and kissed him on the mouth, and there he was, resurrected. I took his sadness from him, and he gasped his way back into the land of the living. I've still got his batch of blues in my purse, and time to time, I catch my finger on them.”
“I know the ones,” said Vix. “Those are the s
ads shaped like a pocketknife.”
She nodded.
“Couple years later, that boy was dead again, this time in the car with the engine on, his soul filled with tired instead of sad, and so I kissed him and took that away, too. He opened his eyes and saw me looking at him, and said, ‘Honey, just let me go. There ain't no good place for me on this whole Earth, and I done my time.’ That's the boy I married, twice risen, thrice dead. It turns out that people have to go their own way. I buried him in our backyard under a shade tree.”
Vix gave her a look that said everything he'd ever loved about her, and she looked back at him, her eyes full.
Lorna held his hand hard. “I wouldn't mind settling down somewhere pretty. Seashore. I wouldn't mind stopping this healing business.” She looked at him. “But I never did take your pain away.”
“I never took your anger,” said Vix. “Figure you had uses for it. I like the ocean too. Town with nobody. Clapboards and a porch. Hot chocolate, me and you, some torches lighting the path down to the beach. We could get a dog and a hammock. Listen to a record player late at night.”
“We could count the stars,” said Lorna. “Maybe write a book.”
“Sometimes, we'd sit and look out at the waves, and just do nothing at all,” Vix said, and kissed her fingers.
“Do people like us ever retire?” asked Lorna. She was twenty-eight and in her healing prime. It'd gotten so when she walked down a street, everyone turned to look, and automatically gave her every dark emotion they'd been carrying. Vix was the same. Two weeks before, he'd been followed down a main street by a couple dozen women, all of whom later resented him. At a post office in the panhandle, he stood next to his own face on a most wanted poster and let a bunch of people take his photograph. Lorna's dress had gotten torn off in a crowd, and now people sold the scraps for souvenirs, all snipping little threads from little threads. Lorna had a new dress, but she still felt bad about the whole thing.
“We can retire if we want to,” Vix said. “Change our names and stop being Public Enemies. They can't put us in jail. Can't have a jail without sorrow and anger. Whole thing would fall down.”
“They could kill us,” said Lorna, and snorted. “That sheriff.”
There was a bullet hole in their back left tire, and they could hear it hissing out air. Headlights were approaching from all directions. They were the tent of the revival. They were miracle makers in the middle of a field. They were healer dealers, and they were tired.
“Or we could kill him,” said Vix. “What've we got in the backseat, Lorn?”
Vix's eyes were on the rearview.
“About a kilo of that straight shit from El Paso. I don't know what was going on there last week, but everything they wanted to be healed of is bagged up. They wanted to forget it ever happened. I threw it in just in case. Thought we might mix it half and half with the sad from Juarez, sell it like that.”
Vix pulled the car over, and Lorna looked at him.
“Strong stuff,” he said. “Good to know. Open that sack.”
Behind their car, Sheriff Hank Yarley crept around in a ditch, belly flat to the ground, rifle strapped to his back, bowie knife in his teeth. The headlights of the mob approached the two most wanted. He'd called out all the cops and righteous volunteers from the border, and they converged on Lorna and Vix, stars in their eyes, bounty in their hearts.
Lorna's long arms lifted the sack onto the roof of the car and she ducked, and that was when Yarley started shooting.
The sack was intact for a moment and then it was perforated.
White dust spun out into the night and into all the parked cars. Men and women were aiming rifles and pistols, aiming darts and clubs and arrows, aiming cameras and holding lanterns, and all of them inhaled.
On his belly, Sheriff Hank Yarley took a deep and accidental breath, and what he breathed was pure, desperate love, cut with nothing. It was burning, scalding, lost and found. Once he took one breath, he had to take another and another, and in a moment, all the people in the mob were choking on it, upending on it, overdosing on it, because too much love was like too much anything.
The seizure of love went through all of Texas, rattling the ground and making strangers fall hard into each other's arms. This was love that took the South and drenched it, and up over the land, a storm of heat and heart took the dirt off the desert. People died of love, writhing on kitchen floors and kissing in traffic, and other people just caught a whiff of it and lived the rest of their lives looking for more. For ten years after, the people in Texas were different than they'd been. The borders opened wide and the river was full of folks from both sides being baptized with tongue. You know the story. You remember those years when everyone forgot who they'd been hating. You remember the drugstores full of nothing but lipsticks and soda pop. The world's past that now, though. That time's long over.
People say that Lorna and Vix stood up from the scene of that last great crime, grimy and gleaming. People say that when they came out of that car, there were fifty bullet holes in the doors and windows, but that Lorna Grant and Vix Beller walked away unscathed. Maybe they went to the seashore. Maybe they went to South America. Maybe they're dead now, or maybe they're old folks healing people's cats, dogs, and parakeets in some faraway city. Sheriff Yarley went on to start a charismatic church, exposed to the great light of some gods of El Paso, and full to the brim with strangers’ love. The others in his posse went wandering around America, preaching peace and pretty-pretty, carrying scraps of Lorna's striped dress and Vix's vest.
In a glass case in Austin you can see the preserved remains of Lorna's little finger, shot off by Sheriff Yarley when she put the desperate love up on the roof. It's lit up under cover for tourists to see, but the rest of the two most wanted are long gone.
Here in Texas, sorrow and fury are back in the bodies of men and women. Some nights, we hear our neighbors moaning and country music on the radio, and some nights we go out walking late, looking to be healed of every hurt, looking for a hand-painted sign that says, come on sinner.
Some nights, all we want is the neon promise of a motel, a hot bed, and some hands to hold us under the covers, and some nights, looking for that much, we keep driving and driving in the dark.
The Thirteen Mercies
After the Flood
BENEATH THE WATER, we good men perform our last Mercies, reversing and reversing.
The History of Everything
There's never been a world that isn't a world at war. That's the truest thing we know, and we've known it since we were boys, since before we got our orders and obeyed them.
We weren't equipped or expected to end that war. We were equipped to move over ground, kill those in our way, and begin again elsewhere, in another part of the world, in another part of the war. We were soldiers. We were born that way.
If ever asked to testify, we were to say only that we were soldiers and had always been soldiers and would always be soldiers.
We were to seek, and to destroy. We were to open mouths and pull out useful truths.
That was our mission. That was what we did.
That is why they sent us here.
Perhaps the war has ended and there's peace on Earth, but if there is, we don't want to know it.
The Punishment for Mercy
Out in the jungle where it rains in perpetuity, there's a woman who's lived for seven hundred years.
We were informed on the first day of our deployment that she'd looped a spell around us like a corral and that we'd suffer here for our sins. This was the arrangement the military court had come to.
General Steng ordered us not to disrespect the directive, though he laughed himself, in his tent. We all heard him, and we laughed, too.
We felt encouraged, held in the gentle hands of our government, given a false punishment that'd look real to the public, a pseudo-impr
isonment on a verdant island. We expected that the sun would rise a hundred times and then we'd be returned to the world. This was only a joke. An old woman. What could an old woman do to us? What could an old woman do to anything?
That was during the early period, when we imagined we'd been sent to this island to perform a secret mission against the enemy rather than to die slowly of rot.
It's rained 2,478 of the past 2,490 days. In our leaking tents, in this, the seventh year of our deployment, we remain. Our sentence brought us directly from the trial to this jungle, blindfolded and gagged, wrists bound.
We're prisoners of our own government, not of any other enemy.
We look at the sky and try to plot our location, but the clouds cover the stars.
The First Coming of Nobody
“Nobody's coming for us,” Lieutenant Matthias Granger says, looking up from his carving. “We'll die here.”
He was from a small town before all this, a place where he'd thought to eventually own a pharmacy. He volunteered. His deeds at Kinotra are well documented. The photograph of his Eighth Mercy, the Reversed Mercy of Truth, was on the front page of the Times.
We keep our promise of pain, even if they are not deserving, those lines went. Though a criminal be forgiven, he will still be punished. The Eighth Reversed Mercy is the Punishment of the Innocent.
I don't turn my head when Lieutenant Granger speaks. He's beside the fire we've lit to keep mosquitoes at bay. General Steng hasn't emerged from his tent in fourteen days. We can hear him talking, to himself or to something else.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 46
