by Casey Lane
Five minutes of goddamn peace and quiet.
“You’re smoking! Smoking while I’m in here suffering,” she went on, her indignation fresh and furious. Her voice trembled and broke on the end like rocks tumbling down the mountainside. “Probably took my cigarettes out here, didn’t you? God forbid you let an old woman’s cigarettes alone. That’s the problem with you, Lettie Cole. You’re too much like your damned daddy. Selfish. Selfish through and through.”
Lettie’s teeth came together again, a sharp, quick gnashing that made the muscles in her neck stand out. I understood her frustration.
Selfish? The woman who cooked every meal, cleaned every room, and wiped the woman’s own ass? When she got an infection in the soft flesh of her left ass cheek, the doctors had inspected the festering wound and sent them home with a pump. It was like one of those sucker fish that used to clean her sister Charley’s tanks. The white tube suctioned the sagging flesh, twitching with each inhalation and release. It pumped the disinfectant into the wound. And who’d cleaned that? Certainly not her precious baby boy.
“I’m the only one in this house that buys the tobacco and rolls it. How am I stealing your cigarettes?” she said with a bitter laugh. “You know what, if you want another coffin nail, who am I to stop you?”
Lettie pinched some of the tobacco between her thumb and forefinger and sprinkled it into the rolling paper. The tobacco smelled both sharp and sweet.
With a shaking hand, she licked the paper closed. She found a black plastic Bic lighter on the stoop, leftover from a previous smoke break. She depressed its red tongue with two strikes of her thumb and flames sparked to life in front of her cupped face. For a moment, I could see the brilliant green of her eyes and the freckles that darkened with each summer day.
She smoked, sending a halo of gray around her. Her mother said nothing.
At least there was peace as Lettie sucked in the first drag, a long, slow pull on the twisted paper, letting the smoke roll through her nose and throat, filling the soft, dark chambers. A touch of burn at the back of the throat, but not much. Or at least, it was nothing compared to that instant calm I felt washing over her. Her shoulders sagged. The muscles in her jaw released. The shake in her hand steadied. I enjoyed all of this—half in and half out of the woman not twenty feet from me. I loved doing this—slipping into her mind as easy as one slips into their own shoes, feeling everything she felt, knowing everything she knew, while she went on, oblivious to my presence as always.
If Lettie was lucky, her mother’s meds would kick in and she’d fall asleep.
She exhaled in a slow, controlled stream. Pale blue smoke rose toward the stars. She sat in the haze, relishing it. The smell. The taste of tobacco on her tongue, before lifting the curling white paper to her lips again. I wondered if I should kiss those lips before or after her heart stopped. I had not yet had the pleasure.
The night was complete and total. The smell of burnt charcoal lingered, and a warm breeze licked at the sweat on the back of her neck. One of the neighbors further down the road had barbequed their supper. Three small black shapes darted across the street. Raccoons, their bushy tails and hunched backs clear in the streetlight’s orange halo for only a moment before they disappeared into the thick shadows beyond.
She didn’t want to go into the house yet.
I didn’t blame her.
It was cooler out on the crooked stoop than inside the house. The house was too warm even with the windows open. She didn’t want to go inside until she was so dead tired that she’d fall asleep straight away. If she tried to sleep before that, she’d only lie there, on top of her covers, sweating and tossing on the stiff mattress with its screeching bed rails.
She could go around back, climb over the busted chain-link fence with a flashlight and screwdriver and try to work the switch. There was a way to turn on the air conditioner manually—but the method was both loud and unreliable. She could bang on that hunched and rusted machine for thirty minutes, wake everyone, and still not get it to turn on. So I could imagine why she didn’t try. Even if it pumped all the cool air she wanted, it wasn’t worth the risk. No amount of air conditioning in the world was worth sacrificing these moments of silence.
During the day, as she listened to Merek’s threats and her mother’s ingratitude, she thought of these quiet times. The precious late-night hours when the house and world was wholly hers. Sometimes she wished that it would be forever night. Just her and the stars and this eternal, unbroken silence.
I should have told her, be careful what you wish for.
Chapter Two
Lettie rolled another cigarette and lay it on the step beside her. Sweat rolled along her temple, from the back of her neck down beneath her collar. I realized with sudden surprise that this was the moment. Our time had come.
The cicadas and the crickets both fell silent. The night held its breath.
Lettie looked up, her eyes sweeping the moonlit yard and empty street. She felt me but saw nothing.
Here, I thought. I’m right here.
Her gaze fixed on the large tree in the center of her front lawn. It was an old live oak with Spanish moss hanging like a shroud from its twisted black branches. This tree had been rooted to this spot long before the Coles came to this part of Southern Georgia, and I suspected it would outlive them all.
Lettie stared into its branches, squinting into the all-pervasive black. The moment I felt her gaze lock on mine my breath hitched.
She kept staring, letting her vision soften at the edges. At that moment, I stepped away from the tree and dared to let her see me for the first time.
“Fucking shit.” She jolted to her feet and stumbled back.
But that was as far as she made it. The hand that held the filled cigarette paper faltered and tobacco spilled out onto the concrete. Instinctively, she reached out and latched onto the rusted wrought-iron railing to right herself.
As I advanced she counted the steps from the stoop to her father’s shotgun propped unoiled and forgotten in a corner of the den. There were no bullets, and she wasn’t even sure it fired, but she was certain she’d feel better with it in her hands.
I noted each of these panicked thoughts before brushing them aside. They were empty ideas that dissolved easily in the black waters of her mind. She didn’t move. She seemed unable to backpedal her feet away from me, a stranger emerging from the darkness. She watched my milk-white hand sweep the moss aside from the oak branches as one might part a curtain, and simply stared.
Would she call for help? I wondered. But she remained silent as her mind tugged back and forth on the face struggling to take shape in her mind. Was I one of Merek’s friends? Was I another junky looking for a fix? She thought my cheeks were gaunt and hollow enough.
One craning look through the front window told me her brother Merek still slept, his chin on his chest like an infant. The blue-white light of the television danced over his sallow skin. He was very thin, practically skeletal in the overstuffed recliner that their father had bought brand new. It too was a shadow of what it once was. A rip across the top with cotton stuffing poking out, and the right arm had two bright strips of gray duct tape stretched over the faded white leather.
“He’s asleep, and he ain’t got any,” Lettie said. She tried to look casual. Unconcerned. But her muscles stayed taut like a wound clock. Merek would never wake up in time. The idea that he would handle this became ridiculous to her.
She glanced at her mother’s open bedroom window. I heard the steady rise and fall of her breath but was certain Lettie could not.
“I just watched him shoot up the last of it. He’ll probably come looking for you or Donnie or whoever when he wakes up,” she said.
I stopped advancing and I remained ten paces from Lettie, my hands in the pockets of my nice suit. A very nice suit. All right, I admit, I’d dressed up for her. But now this was looking like a mistake.
She’d never seen a junkie in a nice suit before. She couldn’t im
agine me as one of the other fool scrappers who spent half their day pawning televisions, radios, or scrap metal, whatever they could lay their hands on.
This wasn’t good. I wasn’t one man to her, but the idea of a man, and even that idea wasn’t shaping up as well as I wanted it to.
“You don’t recognize me?” I asked, and I couldn’t fully hide my surprise.
Her heart began to race. She peered closer, sweat standing out on the bridge of her crooked nose. It’d been broken twice. I delighted in that dimpled bridge as she drank me down. I caught more stray thoughts. Flat, black eyes like a shark’s. She ran my face through a long list of half-forgotten men but found no match.
It’s a trick, her mind warned. Next thing you know, he’ll be stuffing you in the back of a van. Like those stupid women who were too polite to run away when a psychopath said ‘Oh, hey, Beth! Remember me? We had chemistry together. Mrs. Barnes, right?’ And the dumb bitch got in the car to go for a coffee and remembered halfway through being tied up and raped that she didn’t even have Mrs. Barnes for chemistry.
I almost laughed aloud.
“I don’t know you,” she said finally and squeezed the wrought-iron railing tighter.
“Are you sure?” I asked and stepped into a clearer patch of moonlight. “Look at my face.”
She did. But no click of recognition registered in her mind. She saw only surface details. That moment which I feared had come at last. And it’d come with Lettie Cole, of all people.
“I don’t want any trouble,” she said, her voice shaking.
My grin faltered, turning hard at the edges. “Oh, it’s too late for that.”
Chapter Three
Her hands went to her throat and closed around a gold cross. I hadn’t seen it hiding between her breasts until that moment, and I didn’t care. I could think of only one thing, she knows exactly what I am.
I searched her mind, desperate to establish that connection. I wondered if she couldn’t see my face properly. A cloud over the moon perhaps. She was thinking about the cross. That it was a gift from Kai, her daughter, for Mother’s Day, and she’d yet to take it off, because she was afraid if she took it off for even a moment, her brother would run away with it, pawning it in the first shop that took real gold.
“If he owes you money or something, I’ve got nothing to do with that,” she said, her fingers twitching on the gold.
I couldn’t help but smile, my head cocking an inch to one side. She looked ready to scream. I slipped into her mind, trying to grab hold of something, anything to take this utter failure into my control again.
Great. Another sick ass junkie. It doesn’t matter if he’s in a nice suit. He could’ve stole the suit from anybody. Or he could be one of them so-called drug lords. This is Merek’s fault. He led this asshole here, and now I’m the one who has to deal with this bullshit.
There was nothing to grab onto. Every inch of her mind was a slick surface.
“I came to see you, actually,” I said, which was true. It was her scent I followed all those years ago, when she was just a child. She smelled of nightshades and jasmine, and far beyond that, too far for a mortal’s nose, the salty waves of an ocean.
My voice wasn’t what she expected. She’d expected a harsh, grasping voice like her brother’s. One as worn and tired as the pockmarked and hollowed face that matched it—I saw both this face in her mind’s eye and in the recliner behind her, framed by a window. The only difference was that the brother in her mind was bright with her anger. This face blazed with decades of hate and a vigor that the crumpled skeleton in the chair simply did not possess.
I pulled out of her mind, relieved. At least this one small magic had not failed me.
“I don’t know who you are.” She flicked the end of her cigarette out of habit. Nothing happened. The ash fell minutes ago and the end of the burnt paper sat black and wilting. “And even if I’ve forgotten you, which I’ve never forgotten a face in my life, I didn’t invite you here. It’s late and you’re unwelcome. Go home.”
I laughed.
“Listen, man. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but I’m not interested. I just put Momma to bed, so don’t come up in here causing trouble. I’ll call the police. Don’t think I won’t. We have enough junkies in this house.”
This is the part where he begs, she thought. Come on, just five dollars, or ten. I know you’ve got that. That’s what he’ll say. Only they say it every other day until it’s thirty or forty a week and nearly a hundred a month or two hundred that neither Momma nor I can conjure from thin air. The sliding bills from month to month can attest to that. We’ve slid so far that now it seems like all I pay are fees not bills. Late fees, reconnection fees, interest fees, surcharge fees. Things they slap on a bill to make the bill harder to pay. I don’t understand it. If I could pay the damn bill I wouldn’t be stuck with a fee, now would I? But not being able to pay costs more? What kind of fucking world—
“I am not here for money,” I said.
He says that, but I don’t believe it. When your own brother will walk up and say, you got five, Lettie? I know you got five more in you somewhere. Between your tits, maybe? You got five, I’m sure.” And he’ll search you, shake you down, beat you down until he finds it and won’t think about helping you up.
Junkies are flies, buzzing and landing on the same piece of rotting meat. Where there’s one there’s another. And here he is. Sick. Every single one of them—
“No money,” I said. I moved again, in hopes the moonlight would fall on my face, light me up and make me someone she’d loved and wanted. It didn’t happen. “But I am sick. You’re right about that. Not with the drug coursing through your brother’s veins.”
“What you got? Hepatitis?” She flicked the end of the dead cigarette again. “AIDS?”
And more truth plucked from her mind. How she knew about these diseases. How she lost three friends to one and five to the other.
“No,” I said. I was in full moonlight. Nothing. Not a single glimmer of recognition. “Let’s call it…malnourishment.”
She didn’t know me, and that could mean only one thing.
“How about you come back at a decent hour,” she said and took one more step toward the door. “Didn’t your momma ever teach you not to creep up on women in the dark?”
“No,” I said. “I believe my mother skipped that lesson.”
In truth, I barely recalled having a mother. And maybe even those handful of memories were a dream.
The devil would smile like that, she thought, and I refrained from reaching up, from fingering the edges of my smile to see if it was true. A too-pretty smile that somehow manages to soften you, weaken you and yet strikes a pure, deep chord of terror through your guts.
“Well this isn’t how I wanted this to go,” I tell her at last. “But we don’t always get what we want, do we?”
I might as well have stuck the red cherry of a cigarette to the soft underbelly of her arm. She turned and threw herself at the door, intending to get inside and reach her mother’s bedroom as fast as she could. Her mind trilled ahead of her, laying out the plans for getting inside, getting to the room, and calling the police. She was sure there had to be something, surely something that she could use to stave me off until they arrived.
Only she didn’t so much as lift her foot before my hands seized her. I yanked backward. One scrape of boot and then up. Wind whipped and whistled around us. Thankfully, I was high in the sky before she began to scream.
Chapter Four
My arm wrapped itself around her, pinning her against my body. She found it hard and cold, her mind touching on words like unforgiving. I took this opportunity to reach into her mind and pinch off that terrible scream. It worked instantly.
All the spit left her mouth. Control over her own voice dried up like a creek bed in July after two weeks of scorching hot sun and not a drop of rain.
All that came out was a desperate wheeze. Nothing was heard over t
he whipping wind and her heart thudding against her ribs. Tears were pulled from both of our eyes, rendering the world below to little more than a smear of color.
She seemed fixated on the little corner of countryside, as it slept with its six or seven thousand people tucked under their sheets. I saw HWY 44’s four-way with its corner store advertising tackle, bait, and fishing line on one side, and the mechanic across the street on the other. Joe Bean’s Wrench and Wranglers with its bubblegum-pink fluorescents, cracked and flickering.
I wasn’t sure what she saw, knowing my sight was much better.
So high, she thought, and the terror clawed at her throbbing throat. No higher. Please God, not any higher.
I went higher. Listen, when you are as old as I am, you must find pleasure in the moment. And her body trembling against mine—I enjoyed it.
But still, we rose until even those few discernible features in the dark Georgian landscape grew dim. Stars burned in the sky no matter which way she looked.
When it came time to drop, I dropped us fast.
The gravitational pull, which had smoothed my cheeks down like a comic cartoon dog’s, now pushed them up. Tears leaked from the corners of my eye. I let her scream this time as she clutched my arm like it was a safety bar on a roller coaster, like a restraint she didn’t fully trust not to pop open up at any minute and send her plummeting to her death.
I delighted in all the horrible images flashing through her mind. Her brains on railroad tracks. Her body going through the roof of a family home and killing the dog on impact or crashing through a nursery’s cradle or a just-cleaned bathtub.
I laughed softly in her ear. “What a mind you have, Ms. Cole.”
We hit the earth, but her hips and legs didn’t shatter. I absorbed the blow with my body, bending at the knees and adjusting our weight the way she’d once done herself as a child, jumping off the shed into the tall grass with her siblings. Charley and Merek cajoling her into doing it for a third and fourth time even when she grew too tired.
