by Micah Nathan
The old man remembered his terror that night when the house quieted and the candles were snuffed. He lay alone in a grotesque mound of teddy bears, those gruesome fucking things with their mannequin eyes and outstretched limbs. Since that stupid song they’d never stopped coming via crate and mail, thrown over the gates of his home at all hours.
I could take your place, Hank had said. And the terror was that he could. Better face, better voice, better hair, better everything. It had all been Hank’s. The hip swivel. The sneer. The gum-chewing, microphone-belching, pink-Cadillac-driving, rambling rockabilly swagger. Hank invented it all for an audience of one, for the kid with the shock of thick black hair and a high wavery voice, and Hank had told the kid he could take whatever he liked because it meant nothing anymore, not since God zapped Himself into that oil slick and demanded he live a chaste life.
That night, lying among the teddy bears, the old man resolved that if Hank ever renounced his vow and laid claim to his rightful place atop the world—and he remembered that despite everything he still considered his success the greatest con perpetrated since Judas shared matzoh with Jesus—he’d shoot Hank dead. Else the whole motherfucking party would be shut down in the time it takes the DJ to put the needle on the record.
An AMC Gremlin pulled up to the Coyote Café, tires crackling over wet gravel. The old man snapped out of his reverie and reached for his wallet. A young man stepped out of the car. He wore a jean jacket, hair straight and long down the back of his neck.
“You John Barrow?”
The old man held up a thick fold of bills. “You Luke?”
“That’s right.” Luke stepped onto the porch. He took the money and counted it slowly, licking his fingers.
“The bartender promised me good product,” the old man said.
“No worries. I’ve known Jimmy for years.”
“Years, huh. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
When Luke finished counting he fished a small orange plastic bottle from the pocket of his jean jacket and handed it over. The old man shook a handful of pills into his wrinkled palm.
“These blue ones Darvocet?”
“That’s right.”
“It doesn’t say Darvocet.”
“They’re generic.”
“I suppose that Placidyl’s generic, too.”
“Placi-what?”
The old man shook his head. “Goddammit, if I wanted generic, I’d have ordered this shit from Canada.” He starting pacing, and his shirt lifted a little, flashing the pistol tucked into his waistband. “Just what the hell am I supposed to do with a bunch of no-name pills?”
Luke held up his hands, backing down the porch steps.
“The problem, Luke—you listening?—is we don’t know if the lab techs put the right meds into the right containers. And don’t tell me there’s no difference between Dilaudid and Lortab and Phenobarbital, because there’s contraindications to consider. There’s the issue of dosage and timing, tolerance and allergy. People pay good money for name brands because they like to know what they’re getting, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to depend on some fucking Canuck that doesn’t know the difference between a barbiturate and an opioid. You get me?”
“Hey, no problem.” Luke dropped the fold of bills onto a step. “My mistake, so it’s free of charge.”
The old man frowned. “I don’t want a refund. I want what I paid for.”
“I’ll send someone. You keep those and I’ll send someone with name brands.”
“Promise?”
Luke nodded and hurried into his car. As he peeled away the old man bent to retrieve the money, slowly, hands on his lower back. He knew the hippie was lying. He’d send no one. Those days were long gone. Those days when he could pick up the phone at three in the morning and have a private nurse at his bedroom door in less than an hour, wearing sheer thigh-highs and carrying a purse full of goodies.
These will have to do, the old man said to himself, and he pinched a wad of pills from his palm, dry-swallowing them with a practiced wince. Then he leaned against the porch railing and whistled an old Rufus Thomas tune.
They sat in the corner booth. Heather slumped against the wall, eyes closed. Fiona flirted with a tall man in a cowboy hat at the end of the bar. Ben stared into his glass, at twin slivers of floating ice. Alex rested her head on his shoulder and spun her empty glass round and round.
“I think about her all the time,” Ben said. “I don’t want to but I can’t help it. It’s like every day that passes is a little death—another day we’re not together, another day she’s talking with somebody else. I can see years from now when we’re both old photos in each other’s minds—”
“I hate photos,” Alex said. “Every time someone shows me pictures of places they’ve been and people they know, it’s like listening to an inside joke. I don’t get it.”
“Maybe Jess will regret leaving me and maybe she won’t,” Ben said. “But I’ll always wonder. That’s what kills me.”
“You might not always wonder.”
“I will.”
“You might not. I don’t regret leaving Derek.”
Ben laughed to himself. “If I see a pretty girl standing in line at the grocery store, I wonder what it would be like if we got married. When she leaves the store I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. It’s like I get nostalgic for experiences I never had. I’ve already planned our little tragedy: Boy meets hot girl in some roadside bar, they drink, they talk, boy leaves because he’s made a promise to an old man. But boy always wonders about that hot girl, and one day, years later, he returns to the roadside bar, looking for her. But she’s long gone.”
Alex yawned, readjusting her head on his shoulder. “Maybe you like being sad.”
“No. I hate being sad. I hate being wounded.”
“But society wants you to be sad,” said Alex. “After my mom died I realized it’s one of the few times in life when total self-absorption is considered okay. If you’re happily self-absorbed, you’re an asshole, but if you’re sad … Hey, people may not want to be around you, but at least you don’t threaten their delusions by being all happy. There’s a whole culture built around sadness. It makes you feel like a part of something bigger. That’s why they have grief counseling groups, and support groups where people share their sorrows. There aren’t any happy groups, where people meet every week and tell each other all the great things that happened since the last meeting. And don’t tell me it’s because most of our life is suffering. They don’t have happy groups because nobody wants to hear how happy your week was.”
Ben swirled his rum and Coke, listening to the ice clink. “How did your mom die?”
“Cancer. How about your dad?”
Ben took a sip and spit it back into the glass. “Car accident.”
“This is where you say let’s get out of here,” Alex said.
“I can’t.”
“Because it’s not in your little tragedy.”
“Because the old man is crazy about getting to Memphis. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since we left. He’ll want to keep driving through the night.”
“I see.”
“We should meet up in Memphis, though. Or Amsterdam.”
“Maybe,” Alex said.
“Shit,” Ben said. “Did I blow it?”
Alex sat up and kissed him, long enough to show him what he was missing. When she finished she pulled away, his mouth still open, and she said, “You did, but I’ll let it slide.”
Then she stood, slowly, holding on to the seat-back for balance, and slinked her way across the bar, disappearing into the bathroom.
Ben closed his eyes. One week ago if a woman with long blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a fearless kind of tomboy sexiness had pulled him onto a roadhouse dance floor with her hot, drunk friends, he would have driven his Honda hatchback through a nursery school to follow that woman wherever she was headed.
But not now, he thought. His worl
d was shrinking. Just him, the old man, and their Caddy. A mission from God, the old man had said, and Ben didn’t believe him but it began to sound good. Good because it was something different.
I’m doing something greater than looking for random hookups, Ben thought. I’m on an actual mission. The first mission of my life. It’s something people want to be a part of. But it’s just us.
The old man stumbled in through the front door. His clothes were soaked with rain and hair stuck to his forehead. Black hair dye ran into his eyes; he kept wiping them even as he scanned the room.
“Been wasting our time.” The old man pitched forward and caught himself on the back of a booth. “God sent me for Nadine and look what we’re doing.”
Alex emerged from the bathroom and walked past the old man, staring warily at him as he shook a finger at Ben.
“Hank’s come back to reclaim what was his,” the old man said. “Can’t have me, so he’s gone for my granddaughter. No telling what that motherfucker will do. No time to spare. We have to get her.”
Ben looked at Alex. “Give me your number. Before he completely loses it.”
Alex smiled. “You were so much better when you played coy.”
“I wasn’t playing. I am coy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m wounded.”
Alex smiled again. “Okay. But don’t use your wounded excuse for that waiting-three-days-to-call bullshit.”
hottest grl evr wanted 2 fuck and I said no
b/c u r gay
no b/c elvis freaked
what?
“Eyes on the road,” the old man said.
call u later, Ben typed to Patrick then closed his cell. He’d asked the old man for a break—a few hours at a motel, a few hours at a rest stop, or even another sit-down at a diner so he could nap in the booth. But the old man said they needed to get to a town called Eden before nightfall. Ben asked him what was in Eden. The old man wouldn’t answer. Instead he clutched the coffee-ring-stained manila envelope lying across his lap, set his mouth in a hard line, and closed his eyes, and Ben thought he was asleep until he tried to pull over. Then the old man’s eyes snapped open and he told Ben to keep going. All day if he had to, until they got to Eden.
They drove under sagging boughs of beech and white basswood, over pitted roads, past misty green forests dripping warm rain. The AC didn’t work and Ben’s shirt was soaked through. The old man’s face dripped sweat. His speech slurred and his eyes rolled in their sockets, and he grew restless, switching on the radio to a gospel station.
They drove past swollen streams where branches bent against the rushing water, the forests dark despite the sun bullying its way through storm clouds. The old man turned up the radio until the speakers buzzed, and he sang as loud as he had in forty years, bellowing his faith in the Lord and warning the devil to seek shelter elsewhere because his heart was filled with the love of God.
And then he stopped suddenly and looked at the address scrawled on the back of a restaurant napkin. He checked the map, then grabbed the wheel and jerked it, the Caddy swerving off the road, spitting muddied gravel that popped against the windshield. Ben cursed and pulled the wheel back, but he was already at the end of a narrow driveway that disappeared up ahead in a tangle of trees, their limbs choked with moss.
“What the fuck?” Ben yelled, but the old man held his finger to his lips and switched off the radio.
He wiped his face with the sleeve of his red sweatshirt and fumbled for the bottle of water he’d wedged between the seat and door. He gulped the bottle dry and tossed it into the backseat.
“We’ll walk from here,” he said.
It sat hunched, a massive home with a caved roof and a hole in its side, rotting furniture and mounds of knickknacks leaking from its guts into the forest. Towering white pillars rose from a crooked front porch, the paint peeled atop graying wood with raised nap from centuries of rain and heat. The house looked to Ben as though it had never been new or clean or beautiful, but had been built as it now stood—a murdered ruin.
“What is this place?” Ben asked.
“An oracle,” the old man said. “Only one left I know of.”
The old man’s foot broke through the porch and he cursed, yanking it free. He knocked on the door twice and stepped back. They waited, bird cries hailing the end of rain.
The door creaked open, and something ancient whispered to them from the dark, “Who’s that?”
“An old friend.” The old man hitched up his sweatpants and wiped the sweat from his eyes. “I’m in need of information.”
“We no longer have information,” the voice said.
“I’ve come with payment.”
“Have you come here before?”
“When I was a young man.”
The ancient thing stepped into the light and Ben saw an elderly woman, face as wrinkled as sheets balled up at the end of a bed. Her eyes were the color of the winter sky at dusk. She lifted her chin and stared at nothing, reaching out for the old man’s face. He took her hand and held it to his cheek, and her fingers crawled like a spider across his nose, dropping down to rest on his chin.
“I remember you,” she said. “Lots of cream and lots of sugar.”
The old man grinned and then she looked in the direction of Ben.
“And what about him?” She stared with blind eyes. “How does he like his coffee?”
The house was dark, reeking of mold and wet wood. They walked through a labyrinth of high ceilings and cavernous rooms, filled with ornate furniture covered in blossoms of mildew and liquid black trails of ants. The old woman led them past a grand staircase, through a dining room with place settings sitting on a giant table.
They walked through the kitchen and pushed open a heavy creaking door. Two men sat on a couch in a small room with green carpeting and floor-to-ceiling windows dark with grime, remains of old leaves pasted to the outside glass. The two men sat upright, straight and stiff as ship’s masts. Both held canes. Both stared blankly with cloud-white eyes.
“Two visitors,” the first man said. “Delilah, fetch them some coffee.”
“I’m working on it,” she said. “Don’t bark orders when I’m showing them in.”
“I’ll do what I want,” the first man said. “Get that coffee before I shove this cane up your old cunt.”
She muttered something and shuffled away, straining to push through the kitchen door. The old man drew himself up.
“I’m seeking information from another lifetime,” the old man said.
The first man patted the wispy white hairs on the side of his head and sniffed proudly. “Name your name.”
“Hank Rickey.”
The other man nodded and started to talk, but a wet coughing fit overtook him until he spat something thick and bloody onto the floor. “Hank has grown old like us,” he said finally. “Time chipped away at him like sand against the Sphinx.”
“Still a giant,” the first man said. “Heard he led a revival in Jackson some time ago. They said he had a voice that could move mountains.”
“True,” the other man said.
“Slaughters men like lambs,” the first man said. “Marks their blood on the doors of their homes.”
“I can’t say I believe that,” the other man said.
“Makes women throw their underwear,” the first man said. “Makes them swear off underwear rest of their lives.”
“True,” the other man said.
Ben saw tears in the old man’s eyes.
“Heard he got diabetes ten years ago,” the other man said. “They chopped off his leg at the thigh. No more singing.”
“No more singing,” the first man repeated.
The other man sniffed. “Heard he left Memphis for Shake. Retirement. Sunday golf, a maid, and a personal chef to help with his blood sugar problems. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Sure would,” the first man said.
The other man nodded. “Took a child bride wi
th him.”
“Too much work,” the first man said. “Child brides always bitching about one thing or the other.”
“They all bitch,” the other man said.
The old man asked, “Is the child bride Nadine?”
The first man shrugged. “A child bride is all we know.”
Ben looked at the walls. Stock photos in store-bought frames hung high. Cracks ran through the plaster. Cobwebs in the corners billowed gently.
“That all?” the first man said.
The old man rubbed his left pinky. “Last question. My daughter. Is she happy?”
“What daughter is this?” the first man said.
“Lisa Marie.”
“Lisa,” the other man said.
“Lisa Marie,” the old man said.
The first man sniffed. “Don’t know a Lisa Marie.”
The old man stared hard at the floor. He remembered holding her close as if it were yesterday. His baby with tiny clenched fists and eyes that broke his heart. He remembered a dark hotel room, curtains duct-taped with foil on the windows, watching shaky footage of his family emerging from Graceland, pale-faced with grief. Nothing but bullshit if I stuck around, he remembered screaming at the television, then he whipped out his snub-nose and popped three into the tube, exploding sparks and the tinkling rush of glass.
He’d read all the true-crime books. He knew what happened to American gods. They’d kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. Everyone clamoring for a piece of divine flesh. For a teaspoon of the muck.
“Lisa Marie is my daughter,” the old man insisted, and the first man shrugged and thumped his cane on the floor.
The kitchen door swung open and Delilah shambled in, holding a silver tray upon which sat a silver coffeepot and two chipped porcelain cups. The old man took his cup, nodding at Ben to do the same, and Ben mumbled, “Thank you, ma’am.”
The coffee was strong and bitter. The old man heaped a tablespoon of sugar into his and filled it to the top with cream.
“Delilah, bring the knife.” The first man moved his head in the direction of the old man. “Now, which one of you will it be?”
